The controversy over what, exactly, the “mobile bio weapons labs” we found in Iraq really are continues. The CIA came out and said they the trailers were designed for making bio weapons, now the State Department is saying not so fast. I’m inclined to believe that they’re not weapons labs, due to Occam’s Razor, if nothing else. (Imagine a world where these trailers were found by investigators in a different country without any political implications, and any presumption that they were part of Iraq’s seemingly missing weapons programs. Do you think that they’d conclude that these trailers, which could not be used no their own to make biological weapons and contain no traces of biological weapons or their precursors, would be identified as weapons labs?)

The problem with using a fringe distribution of Linux is that you never know when someone is going to decide that it’s not quite fringe enough, and fork it. Thus, some Gentoo participants have decided to break off and create a new distribution, called Zynot. The goal is to make Gentoo more suitable for embedded and enterprise software development, which is a pretty decent reason for a fork. (Gentoo seems heavily aimed at the desktop to me.) Anyway, I like Gentoo pretty well and I hope this new division doesn’t screw things up.

I feel obliged to post about the RIAA’s statement that it will sue “heavy music sharers.” Does this surprise anyone? They have one of their Congressional water boys talking about hax0ring your PC if you pirate copyrighted material. Filing a regular old lawsuit is hardly radical. I guess it’s a testament to my opinion of the RIAA that I find this news rather dull.

I’ve been writing an application that uses Hibernate as a persistence layer instead of just writing SQL statements myself. Hibernate itself has been a complete success. The query language is easy to pick up if you already know SQL, and it really does save a lot of labor. As part of that process, I decided to move my database configuration from a property file based system that I’d come up with myself to JNDI. If you don’t know, JNDI is a system that enables applications to retrieve information of various kinds from something called a “JNDI context.” Most application servers and servlet containers have a JNDI provider built in so that you can store environment-specific information there, making it easy to move your applications from your local machine, to the staging server, to production.

The application is to be deployed under Tomcat, but I was developing it under Resin. There’s an added wrinkle in that my staging server runs Tomcat 4.1.18 under Linux and the production server is to be Tomcat 4.0.x that’s built into a reasonably well known J2EE application server. So I figured out how to set up the JNDI stuff for configuring data sources under Resin. I got that working after much fussing around, and so my next step was to make sure it would work under Tomcat. Well, getting it to work under Tomcat was a ton of work. I had to add the JNDI stuff to the server.xml file, then I had to add aliases to it in context configuration files, then I had to add the Oracle driver to Tomcat’s class path. I’m leaving out some of the other hacking I did. Finally, I got it working. Feeling good about getting the JDBC stuff to work, I tried configuring the SMTP server via JNDI. That worked under Tomcat but then wouldn’t work under Resin.

After wasting way, way too much time on those problems, I built more features for the application and decided to move it to staging to show to some end users. When I went home today, I still didn’t have it working. My context configuration files were preventing my app from being deployed for some reason, and I had the same class path issues as before. Even if I get that to work, I’ll still have problems when I deploy it to the bastardized version of Tomcat where it’s supposed to ultimately live.

I think I’m going to back to my older, more primitive system for configuring these sorts of things. JNDI seems great, but I’m still waiting for the killer implementation. Resin seems closer to Tomcat, but even it wasn’t painless.

There have been some strange synergies in my RSS reader lately. For example, it’s interesting to think about this article (courtesy of Tim Bray) in relation this article (courtesy of Patrick Nielsen Hayden).

The New York Times will be further embarrassed now that officers from the military unit in which Judith Miller was embedded are talking to the press. Not only was Miller publishing dubious rumors about Iraq’s weapons on the front page of the Times, but Howard Kurtz reports that she was playing a much more active role in the mission of the unit than simply accompanying them and reporting on what they were doing. According to the story, Miller acted as a go-between for Ahmed Chalabi (widely believed to be the source of the speculation she published as coming from unnamed sources) and otherwise influenced the unit to do her bidding. This, of course, plays right into my existing image of Miller, whose reporting during the war seemed highly irresponsible to me.

Brad DeLong wrote an eloquent response to Andrew Sullivan’s suggestion that an all-white elite university would be perfectly OK. My thoughts on affirmative action are relatively complicated and in reality probably somewhat muddled. On one hand, I am a big believer in rewarding people based on their deeds rather than on their identity, but on the other hand, the fact that the corridors of power in this country are prowled by white men to the near exclusion of both minorities and women is the product of long term systemic unfairness. The question that I can’t answer is whether this problem will correct itself during the natural course of things and if so, how long it will take?

If you’re a Struts developer, check out StrutsTestCase. It’s a JUnit add-in for testing web applications built with Struts, and looks really cool.

Amazon is now making it official that they’re a software company.

Yole is hanging up his spurs in terms of Syndirella development because he’s got a cool new job at IntelliJ Labs. This certainly seems to bode well for IntelliJ’s new line of .NET products that’s supposed to be in development, and not so well for Syndirella. I’m still hanging my hopes on FeedDemon as my future RSS reader anyway.